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8.4.04 Lynndie England, All-American

The world press is full of the news: Lynndie England and the other Abu Ghraib torturers were "just joking around."

From the get-go, it seemed like it was just a joke," said Special Agent Paul D. Arthur, who was the lead investigator into the abuse, describing Private England's description of the mistreatment in two sworn statements. "They didn't think it was that big a deal, they were just joking around.

So what is more disturbing? Torture as your job or torture as your recreation? The government no doubt wants it all to be a perverse joke, so that all the blame can go to the soldiers. On the TV news last night, a reporter said her defense would be "following orders." Of course, the sergeant she was following orders from is the same one who got her pregnant.

Lynndie England torturing Iraqis with her big American smile was bad enough. Now we must see her 7 months pregnant. It's like something out of a third-rate horror flick. Do you believe in the coming of the anti-Christ? The union of power-drunk Christian hillbilly sadists over the humiliated bodies of Moslems is certainly a petrie dish for the spawning Satan incarnate. Can the end of the world be far behind?

This is what the world has come to. One of the themes of the Cold War was the godlessness of Communism as a threat to the American Way of Life. But now that rhetoric seems like so much marketing spin. The Cold War, in retrospect, was strictly political -- territory, weaponry, gamesmanship. When the Cold War ended, we realized how silly all that was and decided to concentrate on a friendly global economic worldview. And didn't that go to hell fast? Dergulated world domination by profit-crazed multi-national corporations somehow just didn't work out. And yet we wound up with an American administration who can't stop giving it all away to the multi-nationals AND who thinks God told them to invade Iraq.

And suddenly it's easy to envision the anti-Christ and to talk of Armageddon.

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